The First Blue/Green Production Deployment circa 2005

Just a short post from me this week as I focus on publishing the Next Gen DevOps Transformation Framework. My friend and former-colleague Phil Hendren, now of Mind Candy fame, has just published an article about our first experience with Continuous Delivery back at AOL in 2004/5. This story has been told many times by some of the amazing people we were privileged to work with on that project but they have usually told the story from a software engineering perspective. This is the first time the tale has been told from an operations perspective. There are some interesting nuances to this story, I won’t share them now because for now you should just go and read Phil’s article. However I’d like leave you with one thought before you click away. 6 weeks after we went live with the new system and it’s new deployment mechanism Phil writes about we stopped getting bugs in the live environment. 6 weeks after that everyone stopped caring about when the new update would be deployed. If we could achieve that a decade ago imagine what we can do now.

Photo courtesy of Kylie who delights in taking close up photo’s while we’re on holiday that annoy the hell out of me but make good featured images on blog posts 🙂